The City Council will hold a hearing Tuesday on the mayor’s controversial pick for corporation counsel, Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor and longtime lawyer who is currently representing New Jersey in a case against New York.
Mastro, a partner at the firm King and Spalding and the longtime chair of good government group Citizens Union, also served as a top aide to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s. He was officially nominated by Mayor Eric Adams on July 30 to take over from the outgoing Judge Sylvia Hinds-Radix.
The city’s corporation counsel represents not just the mayor but all city employees and the City of New York itself in litigation.
Mastro is currently representing the state of New Jersey in a federal lawsuit against the city’s congestion pricing plan, where the MTA is a defendant. He also represented former Gov. Chris Christie in the “Bridgegate” trial and oil giant Chevron in a case focused on pollution in Ecuador.
If he is confirmed, Mastro would recuse himself from those and any other cases involving the city, according to the mayor’s office.
In April, two-thirds of the City Council, which has to approve the mayor’s pick to lead the city Law Department, one of the largest legal offices in the country, signed on to a letter saying they would not vote to approve Mastro. Voters gave the City Council advice-and-consent power over the position in a 2019 ballot referendum.
Some Council members had spoken against his nomination as soon as news broke in April that he was being eyed as a potential replacement for Hinds-Radix, who had been easily confirmed by the Council at the beginning of the Adams administration and reportedly learned she was being pushed out from news accounts.
The mayor’s team immediately began defending him, with the mayor’s own chief counsel Lisa Zornberg invoking John Adams, a forefather of the United States, as an example of the work lawyers have to do.
“As someone who has taken hard cases, it can never be the case in the United States of America that lawyers are criticized and condemned for taking on hard cases for their clients,” she said at the time.
“John Adams, one of the forefathers of this country in 1770, defended British officers accused of murder after the Boston Massacre,” she continued. “He didn’t hesitate to take on that case because he believed in upholding the rule of law.”
The Adams administration also launched a public relations campaign to support Mastro including opinion pieces, like one published last week in the Staten Island Advance by buildings commissioner Jimmy Oddo and Staten Island State Sen. Andy Lanza.
In another piece published in the Daily News, a former “ethics czar” for President Barack Obama made the case that Mastro is a progressive champion.
Members from the Adams administration have also held meetings with individual Council members to sway votes.
Mayor Adams said at a press briefing earlier this month that Mastro “is the best person to represent the city as we deal with all of these complex legal issues that we’re facing, from the migrant asylum crisis to the FHEPS vouchers.”
“The Corporation Counsel’s office, they have been extremely busy the last two years and eight months. I am focused on getting him through,” Adam said.
It’s unclear if the Adams administration has successfully swayed enough of the 51 council members to vote in favor of his selection, though. Tuesday’s hearing starts at 10 a.m. in the City Council Chambers and includes testimony and questions from council members, as well as Mastro. The public will also be able to testify.
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’s office has been preparing for the hearing like they do for any advice and consent hearing, officials said.
Mastro’s nomination is “unusual” because there’s been so much opposition, according to one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Usually an administration would pull a nomination before a vote if there was this much pushback, they said.
